I'm trying to make a bot send 10 lines of text from an actual txt file of 700 lines

Question

I'm coding a discord bot with Discord.py, and I don't know how to make this work.

@client.command(alisases = ['readfile'])
@commands.check(is_it_me)
async def jeff(ctx):
    with open('Available.txt', 'r') as jeff_file:
        for line in jeff_file:
            await ctx.send(line)

The file contains 700 words, but I want it to send 5 or 10. Could anyone help me?

Answer 1

You can break a line into words using words = line.split(), count the words, then rejoin the words into a single string using text = ' '.join(words).

Splitting lines into words to send the first n words

The following code will send the first n words of the file:

n = 5

@client.command(alisases = ['readfile'])
@commands.check(is_it_me)
async def jeff(ctx):
    with open('Available.txt', 'r') as jeff_file:
        words = []
        while len(words) < n:
            line = next(jeff_file)      # will raise exception StopIteration if fewer than n words in file
            words.append(line.split())
        await ctx.send(' '.join(words[:n]))

Splitting lines into words to send n random words

The following code will read all words from the file, then select n words at random and send those:

import random

n = 5

@client.command(alisases = ['readfile'])
@commands.check(is_it_me)
async def jeff(ctx):
    with open('Available.txt', 'r') as jeff_file:
        words = [w for line in jeff_file for w in line.split()]
        n_random_words = random.sample(words, n)   # raises exception ValueError if fewer than n words in file
        # n_random_words = random.choices(words, k=n)  # doesn't raise an exception, but can choose the same word more than once if you're unlucky
        await ctx.send(' '.join(n_random_words))

Sending the first n lines

The following code will read and send the first n lines from the file:

n = 5

@client.command(alisases = ['readfile'])
@commands.check(is_it_me)
async def jeff(ctx):
    with open('Available.txt', 'r') as jeff_file:
        for _ in range(n):
            line = next(jeff_file)  # will raise exception StopIteration if fewer than n lines in file
            await ctx.send(line)

Sending the first n lines, or fewer lines if there are fewer than n lines in file

n = 5

@client.command(alisases = ['readfile'])
@commands.check(is_it_me)
async def jeff(ctx):
    with open('Available.txt', 'r') as jeff_file:
        try:
            for _ in range(n):
                line = next(jeff_file)
                await ctx.send(line)
        except StopIteration:
            pass

Sending n random lines

The following code will read the whole file and send n random lines:

import random

n = 5

@client.command(alisases = ['readfile'])
@commands.check(is_it_me)
async def jeff(ctx):
    with open('Available.txt', 'r') as jeff_file:
        all_lines = [line for line in jeff_file]
        n_lines = random.sample(all_lines, n)  # will raise exception ValueError if fewer than n words in file
        # n_lines = random.choices(all_lines, k = n)  # doesn't raise an exception, but might choose the same line more than once
        await ctx.send(line)

Answer 2

The other answers are works but if you want your code simpler and one line, you can use:

n = 5
@client.command(alisases = ['readfile'])
@commands.check(is_it_me)
async def jeff(ctx):
    await ctx.send(' '.join(open('Available.txt', 'r').read().split(' ')[:n]))

This will send the first n words from the document.

Answer 3

You can maybe use enumerate and break the loop like this:

@client.command(alisases = ['readfile'])
@commands.check(is_it_me)
async def jeff(ctx):
    with open('Available.txt', 'r') as jeff_file:
         jeff_lines = jeff_file.readlines()
         for i, line in enumerate(jeff_lines):
                if i == 5:
                    break
                else:
                    await ctx.send(line)